Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.

Detroit is synonymous with autos, Los Angeles with motion pictures, and Texas with oil. Pittsburgh still conjures steel. When a product or service anchors a region’s economy, that sector has power. Politicians court industry. Industry demands representation and, ideally, protection.

What’s true regionally is just as true nationally. That’s why K Street exists and lobbyists make big bucks. Fortunes rise and fall, but if our GDP slips even 3%, the usual talking heads sprint to the cameras to declare the American economy on the verge of collapse — and always under whichever Republican is in office. When a Democrat presides over a faltering economy, the political media prefers to drive the getaway car.

Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.

If any of us invented a product that added 3% to national GDP, we’d enjoy the influence over policy and legislation that naturally comes with living in a representative republic with a market economy. Innovation and competition fuel prosperity.

So here’s a question the blue-city, blue-state establishment doesn’t want asked: What percentage of its GDP comes from narcotics trafficking?

Recently a member of our self-styled House of Lords, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, erupted in outrage over the Pentagon’s lethal targeting of drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He said he was “deeply disturbed” by these operations. Was Reed ever equally disturbed by narcotics deaths in Providence or Pawtucket?

Some Democrats insist the traffickers are “impoverished fishermen.” Reed himself defended them on the grounds that “they are just trying to make money,” as if they weren’t waging chemical warfare on our civilian population. And he reassured us that the men killed weren’t running fentanyl — only cocaine. As though cocaine were some kind of civic improvement!

By any honest analysis, an overnight eradication of drug addiction in America would collapse an entire NGO ecosystem — along with the payrolls of the consultants, therapists, and bureaucrats who perpetually “mitigate” our crises of addiction, alcoholism, and dereliction. Given the nature of addiction, that blessed day will never come.

Look south. By my estimation, two-thirds of Mexico’s economy is directly or indirectly tied to narcotics. No, that’s not the Wall Street Journal’s number; nobody has the real statistics because the books are kept on scraps of paper known in DEA argot as “Pay/Owe” sheets. My estimate comes from observing the level of protection the trade enjoys at every tier of Mexican governance — local, rural, national. Narcotics are so economically essential that cartels decide who can run in elections with preordained outcomes. Their influence rivals that of the Democratic Party’s super delegates, if you’ll pardon the comparison.

Big Narco commands private armies, armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles, machine guns, uniforms, rules, and courts. The narcotics sector has effectively stalled Mexico’s political maturation.

And it’s affecting us too.

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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In past administrations, the so-called war on drugs looked more like a war on addicts and their families, with only token strikes on the international criminal organizations moving the product. The Trump administration has reversed that. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is hitting the cartels directly. Harassing users did nothing to stop the poison. Blowing up supply at sea does. Every sunken shipment dents the cartels’ profits. Every explosion represents a tangible loss.

The hysterics from Jack Reed and others suggest these interdictions are hurting the economies of blue cities and states more than they care to admit. You’d think the destruction of cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl — inflicting daily carnage — would spark celebration. In Los Angeles County alone, the coroner processes six dead Americans per day from overdoses. Last year, it was eight. Fathers, mothers, runaway teens, derelict addicts — Americans, dead every day.

And yet Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) — raw with presidential ambition — insists the leading cause of death for young Californians is firearms. This is false of course. But to blue-city politicians, gun control makes for better PR than confronting thousands of overdose deaths. Meanwhile Sacramento’s ruling cabal has passed a thicket of laws, regulations, and policies that effectively protect narcotics trafficking in the Golden State.

Guns hardly register in California’s GDP. Big Narco does.